The Triumph of Christianity (8 page)

The Persecuted Church in Jerusalem

T
HE FIRST GENERATION OF
Jesus’s followers identified themselves as “Nazarenes,”
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but everyone regarded the congregation in Jerusalem as the “mother church.”
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This was appropriate given that, as the location of the Temple, Jerusalem remained the authoritative center of Judaism, and the Nazarenes all still regarded themselves as devout Jews and continued to observe the Law. The leaders attended daily prayers in the Temple and afterward held evangelistic sessions in the outer court. This was a chronic source of conflict with other Jews, a clash that Paul and other missionaries also often aroused by continuing to teach the Christian message in the synagogues of the Diaspora. For doing this, Paul claimed to have been severely beaten eight times and stoned once (2 Cor. 11:24–25).

From the perspective of rank-and-file members, the life of the Jesus Movement was centered on gatherings in private homes, with “a focus on a common meal.”
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This probably had aspects of the “last supper” and, of course, allowed everyone to participate in the sacred, communal life. A vital part of the group’s mission was to preserve and transmit the teachings and activities of Jesus, thus it seems “likely that the first written collections of Gospel traditions were produced in Jerusalem.”
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This also helps explain why the Gospels sometimes reflect both fear and antagonism toward Jews; the first writers were people directly affected by the embattled situation of the Jesus Movement in Palestine.
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An immense amount has been written about the Roman persecutions, but it is difficult to find more than a few lines here and there about the Jewish persecutions of the early church, whether in Palestine or in the Diaspora. Of the few studies written on this matter, some dismiss the claims that Jews persecuted Christians as fantasies and falsehoods.
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According to James Everett Seaver, “the universal, tenacious, and malicious Jewish hatred of Christianity referred to by the church fathers and countless others has no existence in historical fact.”
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Others indict the
claims
about Jewish persecutions of the early Christians as further proof of Christian anti-Semitism.
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Still others quibble that these conflicts were “intra-Jewish” and therefore cannot be identified as Jewish mistreatment of Christians.
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But most writers simply ignore the entire matter. That may be
politique,
but it is irresponsible.

These very early persecutions not only happened; they probably were a far more dangerous threat to the survival of the faith than were those by the Romans, given how very few Christians there were when these events occurred. Even by the end of the first century there probably still were only about seven thousand Christians on earth, (see chapter 9) and the total number in Jerusalem in the 40s and 50s could not have exceeded several hundred. Given their lack of numbers and that they proclaimed that a man crucified for blasphemy was the promised Messiah, their persecution was inevitable.
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And it began almost at once.

Caiaphas, who had presided over the trial of Jesus, remained high priest until 37
CE
, and was as hostile to the Jesus Movement as he had been to its founder. As a result, in 34 or 35
CE
, Stephen, one of the prominent members of the movement, was convicted by the Sanhedrin of blasphemy against Moses and God and stoned to death. According to Acts 8:1 Paul (Saul) was present and favored putting Stephen to death. At that time Paul was a Pharisee and an extremist in his opposition to Christianity. Consequently, “on that day [when Stephen was stoned] a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria.... Saul laid waste the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:1–3). Long after his conversion, Paul confessed in his letter to the Galatians: “For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it” (1:13). And in Acts 22:4–5 Paul is quoted as saying “I persecuted [Christians] to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women, as the high priest and the whole council of elders bear me witness.”

We don’t know more about the extent of this persecution or how long it took for the Jesus Movement to recover. What we do know is that the conversion of Paul did nothing to improve the circumstances of Christians in Jerusalem. Although the surviving accounts focus on especially significant executions, there are scattered hints that the antagonism against Jewish Christians was unrelenting and that only Roman pressures against disorder prevented them from being wiped out.
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Keep in mind that this was an era of intense conflict and violence all across the spectrum of Jewish pluralism (see chapter 2). The Sicarii lurked where crowds gathered and they even murdered high priests whom they deemed insufficiently zealous. It is silly to suppose that Christians would have been exempt.

The next to be martyred was James, son of Zebedee, and one of Jesus’s first disciples. His death was ordered in 44
CE
by King Herod Agrippa, perhaps in response to requests by the high priest, and this execution also seems to have been part of a more general persecution—“the king laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church” (Acts 12:1). Peter also was arrested at this time. He subsequently escaped and fled (possibly to Antioch), and it was not until after the king’s death that Peter returned to Jerusalem.

In about the year 56, Paul made his last visit to Jerusalem. His reputation as a missionary to the Gentiles who did not require converts to observe the Law was well known and resented, not only by most Jews, but seemingly by most Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Thus it was that

the Jews from Asia, who had seen him in the temple, stirred up all the crowd and laid hands on him, crying out “Men of Israel, help! This is the man who is teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and this place; moreover, he also brought Greeks into the temple and he has defiled this holy place.”... Then all the city was aroused, and the people ran together; they seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple.... And as they were trying to kill him, word came to the tribune of the cohort that all Jerusalem was in confusion. He at once took soldiers and centurions, and ran down to them; and when they saw the tribune and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul (Acts 21:27–28, 30–32).

The tribune had Paul bound with chains and took him back to the barracks. Eventually, of course, Paul was sent to Rome for trial—a right of all Roman citizens, Paul being one—and eventually he was executed there, probably by order of Nero.

Finally, in 62
CE
the high priest Ananus had James, brother of Jesus and head of the church (he sometimes is identified as the first pope), called before the Sanhedrin during a time when the Roman procurator had died and his replacement had not yet arrived. With no Roman presence to circumvent, Ananus had James convicted and pushed from a tower—he survived the fall to then be stoned and beaten to death. Although some prominent Pharisees vehemently protested James’s death, as Josephus
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noted, not only James, but also “certain others” were convicted on this occasion and then stoned. Again, we don’t know the extent of the persecution, although Eusebius claimed that “as for the other apostles, countless plots were laid against their lives and they were banished from the land of Judea.”
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Nor do we know the fate of the Jesus Movement during the reign of terror when zealots purged Jerusalem and other cities during the late 60s at the start of the Great Revolt, but according to Eusebius,
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at this time most members of the Jesus Movement probably relocated east of the Jordan River in Pella of the Decapolis.
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We do know that the revolt was long and bloody and that in 70
CE
the Roman commander Titus destroyed Jerusalem down to its foundations, carted the Temple treasures back to Rome, and prohibited anyone but Roman soldiers from the ruins of the city. Whatever the impact of these events on the Jesus Movement, there still were settlements of Christians in Palestine to be persecuted by Bar Kokhba during the Second Revolt (132–135).
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Mission to the World

F
OLLOWING HIS CONVERSION IN
about the year 35, Paul appears to have devoted many years to missionary efforts in the East, with what results we do not know. That we don’t is the telling detail. From earliest days, the Jesus Movement appears to have devoted its primary efforts to the East, as reflected in the rapid growth and spread of eastern Christianity, once stretching from Syria to China. But even though it endured for centuries, when the Asian church perished, most of the knowledge of this remarkable chapter in Christian history perished too. Recently, there have been some fine efforts to reclaim this lost era.
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However, these accounts begin in the late second and third centuries because not even many legends survive about earlier times.

We know far more about Paul’s missions to the West than those of anyone else because he happened to have been accompanied on two of his mission journeys by a competent historian who later spent two years with him in Rome, when Paul was under house arrest. Luke was a Gentile convert and in addition to writing Acts he also wrote the Gospel named for him. In fact, most Bible scholars believe that Luke and Acts are a single continued work—both dedicated to Theophilus (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1), who probably was a Roman official.
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Since he referred to his Gospel at the start of Acts, we know that Luke wrote it first—perhaps in about 60 or 61. Acts must have been written soon after since it does not include Paul’s re-arrest and execution, which happened in about 66.

Although Paul is famous for his missionary journeys, he was, in fact, quite sedentary. His active mission efforts in the West began in about 47
CE
and ended with his arrest in Jerusalem in 56 (after that he was under house arrest in Caesarea and Rome). Of this nine-year period, more than two years were spent in Ephesus, three years in Corinth, and at least a year in Antioch. That leaves about three years for his three long mission journeys.

Paul’s journeys are well known, even if there is some confusion as to what happened where and when. The same applies to the “Council in Jerusalem” where Paul was given permission to convert Christians without requiring them to observe the Law or be circumcised. This was not unanimously accepted by the Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem, which seems to have been split between Hellenized Jews who favored it (Paul himself was, of course, a Hellenized Jew from Tarsus), and a more traditional faction—even though the very traditional James sided with Paul. Although this decision to liberate Christian members from the need to adopt Jewish ethnicity stirred up some bitter controversies, it was crucial to the eventual success of Christianity. All these things are so well-known as not to need retelling here, but what is little known is how Paul went about missionizing.

In the beginning Paul and Barnabas may have just walked into a town with several apprentices in tow and started preaching in the synagogue. If so, Paul soon learned better and refused to go anywhere without careful prior arrangements and some commitments of support. Typically, he began a visit to a new community by holding “privately organized meetings under the patronage of eminent persons... who provided him with... an audience composed of their dependents.”
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Paul did not travel alone, or even with a few supporters. Instead, he often was accompanied by a retinue of as many as forty followers, sufficient to constitute an initial “congregation,”
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which made it possible to hold credible worship services and to welcome and form bonds with newcomers.

Among Paul’s entourage there undoubtedly were scribes, as was typical in this day when even books had to be written by hand and copied the same way, one at a time. Most of the prolific early church fathers had remarkably large staffs to write down and copy their words.
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We even know the name of one of Paul’s scribes since he revealed himself at the end of Romans (16:22), where, after Paul’s long list of individual greetings, he added “I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.” Upon arrival, Paul would “gather any Christians already living in the city,”
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attaching them to his “imported” congregation, and then use their social networks as the basis for further recruitment (see below). Finally, once the congregation was going and had adequately trained local leaders, Paul moved on, but maintained close contact through messengers and letters, and sometimes by making return visits. As Helmut Koester summed up: “Paul’s missionary work, therefore, should not be thought of as the humble efforts of a lonely missionary. Rather, it was a well-planned, large-scale organization.”
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In fact, it is not clear that Paul usually played any effective direct role in establishing new Christian congregations. As mentioned, Christians already were meeting in many of the cities Paul visited, and mission visits such as Paul’s have little impact on the conversion of individuals to a new religious movement, because that’s not how conversions occur.

On Conversion

F
OR GENERATIONS IT WAS
assumed that religious conversions were the result of doctrinal appeal—that people embraced a new faith because they found its teachings particularly appealing, especially if these teachings seemed to solve serious problems or dissatisfactions that afflicted them. Surprisingly, when sociologists
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took the trouble to actually go out and watch conversions take place, they discovered that doctrines are of very secondary importance in the initial decision to convert. One must, of course, leave room for those rare conversions resulting from mystical experiences such as Paul’s on the road to Damascus. But such instances aside, conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. Put more formally:
people tend to convert to a religious group when their social ties to members outweigh their ties to outsiders who might oppose the conversion, and this often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes
.